n't trust anybody with it but me. Say, he's some kid, ain't
he, Wanda?"

Beaming on her like a cherub in checked suit and brilliant necktie, he
approached a little nearer and whispered again,

"Me, I'll just mosey out on the porch while you flash your eyes over
Red's handwrite. Delicacy's my other name, times like this."

Still beaming he winked again, still winking let himself silently out
of the front door.

Considering that all Wayne Shandon had to write a letter about was to
tell Wanda that he was hurrying out with the herds to-morrow, that when
during the next few weeks he could get back he would signal with smoke
from the cliffs above her cave, it must have taken him a long time to
say it. Considering how little she had to read Wanda must have been
very deliberate in reading Wayne's scrawl. At any rate, long before
she had finished, Mr. Willie Dart had gone silently down the porch,
peered in the kitchen window at Mrs. Leland and Julia, continued on to
the door of Martin's study and let himself in. The door had been
locked, at that, when Dart's beautiful fingers first touched it, and
they had done what Mr. Dart himself termed "plying his profession."

"I ain't had a chance like this since I was three," Mr. Dart told
himself contentedly. "Honest, I ain't. Now, if these nice old country
gents think they can put over something with my old pal Red, and me not
know just how they're figuring on the skinning party, they better wise
up."

He closed the door silently, and any sound he made might have been that
of a pin dropped on a thick carpet. He surveyed the room with eyes
that missed nothing.

"I knew it," he smiled, as though at the sight of an old friend as he
found the safe in the far corner of the room. "I heard your door shut
the other day, old party, when I was chumming with Wanda and you and
the rest of the combination was talking war talk. Not to waste time
we'll begin with you."

It was an old safe, an old, old make and style, and Mr. Dart sighed and
shook his head a little disappointedly as he knelt, brought out of his
pockets a set of bright, new tools and set to work.

"Any time," he mused when the door swung open, "that they put a pal of
mine out of the running they better get up-to-date."

CHAPTER XVI

AND SOLVES A FASCINATING MYSTERY

Riding furiously with the fury of the storm as though swept onward with
it, looking the very spirit of the wintry season that is made of black